gdanmitchell
Offline
• • • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
Alan Brock wrote:
I respect you for being open and honest about where the moon came from. I have no problem with compositing in the right circumstances. Bringing in a moon that wasn't in the original composition is taking it a bit beyond what I would do, but to each their own. With that being said, the moon has been composited in front of the clouds in the reflection; a significant amount of clouds have been removed from the upper left sky, but not in the reflection.
From the very small amount of time I spend on here, it is clearly obvious that your posts stir up SOMETHING in a wide range of people. Perhaps that is your desire. After all, it does keep your posts relevant for long periods of time. I myself have bumped this post alone twice, and any publicity is good publicity!
Any photography is art, but I believe landscape photography is a bit different. Our substrate is not a blank canvas, but something that already exists. Sure we all make different interpretations, and nothing looks EXACTLY like the scene we witness. However, I believe there is implied integrity when presenting a landscape image; that the image presented at least looks close to the actual scene. Our experiences tell us innately that things should look a certain way. When an image deviates too far from what our brain tells us is "right," it causes the viewer to imply that the image isn't real. Because we are interpreting something that is real, anything perceived as fake causes a reaction, even if the photographer is honest about his methods.
Anyway, that's my 2 cents. It's worth exactly what you paid for it!  ...Show more →
Photographs always lie, but photography carries a burden of reality.
To those who are uninterested in such things and who prefer to just look at the pictures, please skip what follows — it is not written for you. ;-)
Except for photographers who overtly and obviously manipulate reality in major ways as a central concept of their work — see Jerry Uelsmann, for example, or some work by John Paul Caponigro — viewers come to photographs believing that they began with the real. Photographers can respond to this basic presumption in photography in a number of ways, and perhaps in landscape photography the response has even more implications.
Let's say you are JPC or Uelsmann and a major point of your photography is to produce visual art that derives from the landscape but then combines it with non-landscape elements or takes those elements and fundamentally rearranges them so that they intentionally no longer can be taken to represent the real landscape. These photographers openly embrace, and in fact center their work around, creating completely imaginary fantastical worlds out of materials derived from the landscape, or what I refer to as "imaginary landscapes." The photographer and the viewer are on exactly the same page here – both accept and embrace the fantasy and the sometimes more ambiguous line between the real and the imagined.
On the other hand, let's say you are a photographer who builds and bases a reputation not on the creation of visual fantasies — things we all know are not and cannot be real — but who instead on going to great lengths to travel to "special places," often telling stories of finding special places and special conditions that less focused and driven photographers do not find. Such a photographer might create the impression that it is his unusual and special ability to put in the effort to find and go to such places and to find and see the most special moments that makes it possible for him to reveal to us the actual natural beauties of this landscape. In fact, many who might admire such a photographer do so not only because of the abstract beauty of the photographs but very much because of what they are said to represent: special and exceptional real times and places and light and circumstances that exist, but which can only be found and seen by a person who was there.
(Speaking for myself, I am most definitely not an "anti-manipulation" photographer or viewer of photographs. I embrace the necessity of post-production work to transform the captured image of the literal place into an effective equivalent in print — and simply "capturing" the SOOC original will not work. But that's a different sort of thing.)
This is the question. Not, is it OK or not to composite a photograph out of elements that were not all present in the frame when the photograph was made, but to what extent is such a thing consistent or not with the notions about the specific photographer's work based on what the photographer would have us believe about it, or even about what the photographer tells us implicitly or explicitly about his/her work.
When Uelsmann or Caponigro insert a person or a cloud or a spectral reflection into an image, doing so is the point and the acknowledged dissonance with "reality" is a big part of the point of the photograph. When a photographer who builds a reputation as a person who sees and experiences and shares a special view of "the real" does such a thing and explicitly says that it is something else or implicitly goes along with the assumptions of the misled viewers, it is a different sort of thing.
Two final comments:
1. The question of how far is too far is complicated. This is not quite a binary where either no manipulation is permitted or where it doesn't matter when, where, or how one manipulates. The real issues are in the complex middle ground and they are subjective and relative. Nonetheless, these decisions do have import and consequences.
2. I applaud this photographer for ultimately coming clean about this particular photograph. One of my own personal boundaries is that I won't do something in a photograph that accepts and operates on that presumption of photographic reality unless I would be willing to openly discuss it — so we're closer to being on the same page in that regard.
Dan,
whose personal response to that moon is that a) is looks nice in this image, b) the image could look nice without it, and c) a photographer who inserts such things into the image that viewers are encouraged or allowed to accept as being a representation of "the real" will have some careful thinking to do.
|
Archive 2015 · Southwest Supernova
. But that has always sort of stuck with me. When my favorite photographers like Alex Noriega, or Marc Adamus, or whoever post, I don't expect the break down of creative post processing techniques applied to the image, to be listed. But if I ask and get an answer, it is always nice to learn from what they did, or do, or their approach.
!